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June 2002
Plenary Session
Affordable housing, reauthorization to shape future of smart growth
Bruce Katz
The major trend affecting cities and metropolitan areas nationwide is the rampant decentralization of economic and residential life, or "sprawl." Demographic changes over the past decade demonstrate this clearly, with growth in suburbs and even exurbs far exceeding that of central cities. Another important trend is racial and ethnic change, with city growth fueled by immigration and increases in the foreign-born population, and suburbs also becoming more diverse.
The implications of these changes are profound—for jobs, for politics, for services, for homebuying and housing, and for transportation. Combined, these changes form the canvas of "The New Metropolitan Reality," painted by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, in his May 22 luncheon speech. The Twin Cities area, with its metropolitan governance and tax sharing policies, is relatively well positioned to curb sprawl but also faces what Katz says is a major challenge nationwide—affordable housing.
He began by placing transportation in the context of urban growth. In the top 100 metropolitan areas, the rate of population growth for suburbs was twice that of central cities—8.8 percent versus 17 percent—from 1990 to 2000. Locally, Minneapolis grew 4 percent during the 1990s, and St. Paul 5 percent. Yet the dominant growth by far was in the metropolitan statistical area—up 17 percent, or 430,000 people, during the 1990s.
And as population goes, so do jobs. The nation's suburbs now dominate employment growth and are no longer just bedroom communities for workers commuting to traditional downtowns. "The American economy is rapidly becoming an exit ramp economy, with office, commercial, and retail facilities increasingly located along suburban freeways," Katz said. Moreover, across the largest 100 metro areas, on average, only 22 percent of people work within three miles of the city center; in the Twin Cities, just 13 percent do.
Decentralization is occurring for various reasons, including the rise in new households, market restructuring, and consolidation in retail markets. "Yet it is also about federal, state, and local governments that tilt the playing field against older communities (cities and older suburbs) and towards newer places," he said. These spending, tax, regulatory, and administrative policies form "rules of the development game" that send strong signals to markets and consumers to "build out, build new, abandon old, and avoid the costs of concentrated poverty."
But increasingly, a growing number of constituencies are coming to the conclusion that they do not benefit from these growth patterns. Disparate groups—leaders from central cities as well as old and new suburbs, environmentalists, preservationists, business leaders—are starting to coalesce around a smart growth agenda that has three core objectives: curbing sprawl at the periphery; promoting reinvestment in older communities; and promoting a new form of development that is mixed use, transit-oriented, and pedestrian friendly.
The smart growth conversation is alive and well in the Twin Cities, he said, yet a crucial challenge is affordable housing. "Most smart growth efforts are simply not including affordable housing in the equation, yet growth patterns are directly related to the location of affordable housing."
When the supply of affordable housing is limited in scale and limited in place, Katz said several things happen: first, many working poor get concentrated in particular parts of a metropolis, usually far from educational and employment opportunities; second, the housing/jobs imbalance worsens the area's traffic congestion by forcing families to travel long distances to their place of employment; third, the housing/jobs imbalance places enormous stresses on the region's employers by limiting the pool of workers who can live within a reasonable commuting distance; and fourth, affordable housing concentration forces leapfrog development.
Thus, the location and supply of affordable housing must be part of the policy conversation if alternative growth patterns are to be pursued, Katz declared. That will be mean some tough decisions to increase the supply of affordable housing in both older communities and new growth areas. For example, local zoning rules will need to be reexamined and revised, state and local building codes changed, and special loan funds considered.
While affordable housing is the Twin Cities' challenge, an opportunity is next year's reauthorization of federal transportation law. The Twin Cities may be one of the best positioned metro areas in the country to respond to the challenge and take advantage of the opportunity, and he encouraged the Twin Cities to be engaged on reauthorization, in particular considering seven federal reforms:
- First, promote a sunshine law for transportation to better inform decision making at the state and regional levels.
- Second, strengthen metropolitan governance of transportation.
- Third, significantly expand funding for the planning of large-scale infrastructure projects in older communities.
- Fourth, provide incentives to metro areas to connect transportation and land use and transportation and housing.
- Fifth, provide greater incentives to states and metro areas to make better connections between areas of growing employment and residential areas of low-wage workers.
- Sixth, respond to the aging of our population.
- Seventh, produce better research and data on transportation, and develop a network of independent and objective researchers who can help communities grapple with the serious transportation challenges they face in the new century.
The Twin Cities has become one of the leading metropolitan areas of our country and the world, Katz concluded, "but you need to deal with some critical issues—housing affordability, congestion, and balanced growth among them—if you are going to maintain your edge and your competitiveness."
(This article was excerpted from Katz's full speech, available in the Research Conference area.)